Our Ref:         FOI-0066-1819

Thank you for your request received on 9 April 2018 asking for information about correspondence with Uber.
 
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and TfL’s information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require.
 
Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
 
Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.
 
We have estimated that it would cost over £450 to provide a response to your current request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested. We do not hold any emails that have been sent directly between Vernon Everitt and Uber within the timeframe you have specified. However, his email account does contain other information referencing “Uber” (in internal communications) and this would need to be manually reviewed to determine whether it is caught by your request.

Many of these emails are likely to be not relevant, duplicates, due to emails being repeated within email chains, as well as emails being forwarded internally for discussion during this time period. Therefore the actual number of emails covered by your request will be a sub-set of these. However, locating those that are relevant would require us to manually review all of them to determine whether the email, or email chain, is relevant to your request and then we would need to extract and compile all of those that meet your request.
 
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by Transport for London. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. For example, a brief review of these results indicate a significant proportion are likely to be ‘media summary’ circular emails rather than direct emails between staff. You should therefore focus your request as specifically as possible to ensure we are able to conduct a more targeted search. Please also note that it is possible that exemptions in the FOI Act, for instance, the exemption for information which is covered by legal professional privilege, may be relevant to information on this subject.
 
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Gemma Jacob
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
[email protected]